Chrome may be one of the most popular web browsers out there, but its new tab page still manages to look like an unfinished product much of time. That's because the browser takes screenshots of your most visited webpages and lists them in a 4 x 2 grid, only sometimes it doesn't have a screenshot to work with. In those cases, it leaves the square blank.

You don't have to be picky to notice that scrolling performance on Chrome is less than stellar. Google has been using the Touch Events input API for touch and mouse navigation, but now it has made the decision to go to the Pointer Events standard. What does that mean? Scrolling in Chrome is about to get a lot less janky.

For those who may not already know, HTTP/2 (spec) is a network protocol generally used by web browsers for transferring the HTML, images, and other resources that make up web pages – but it is frequently used by countless other types of apps for communication, as well.

You're probably more aware of WebView after the recent dust-up over security issues in older versions of Android. WebView is a tool developers can use to display web content in an app without implementing a whole browser, and today Google is opening a beta test for WebView on Android 5.0 and higher. Simply head over to the Google+ page to join and get the latest tweaks and fixes.

If you're the type of person that closely follows networking protocols and web server optimizations, you've probably heard of SPDY. This is Google's re-imagining of the HTTP protocol, designed to reduce latency, streamline data flow, and generally speed up data transmission from a server to your browser. Well, you can forget about it. Google is about to kill SPDY, but for a good reason. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is getting close to finalizing a major revision to the HTTP protocol, dubbed HTTP/2.

Not all of the changes to Android 5.0 Lollipop are meant to be seen by regular users, but that doesn't make them any less important. One of the core components of the operating system is about to break free from the shackles of firmware updates and join the Play Store and Google Play services in receiving automatic updates directly from Google.

The Chromium issue tracker can sometimes prove to be a good source of juicy bits of information for those inclined to explore its depths. Most recently, we saw several UI refinements in the Bluetooth settings screen for Android L, but today an actual video has shown up depicting Chromium running on an even newer build - LRW87D, which is apparently just five days old.

First reported by Myce, the video demonstrates a Chromium crash, which itself isn't so interesting.

Nexus 4 owners, don't lose hope. Though your 2012 Google phone was cruelly looked over for the developer preview builds of Android L (along with everything that wasn't a Nexus 7 2013 or Nexus 5), sharp-eyed Google+ users have spotted two different Google employees posting on the Chromium section of code.google.com claiming to use the Nexus 4 with Android L. Check out this entry from a contributor with a Chromium.org email address, explicitly using the "LRW52G" build of Android on his or her N4.

The Chromium Issue Tracker, a perennial source of accidental "leaks" and unreleased information, has delivered something interesting (the issue appears to have since been removed). Reddit user Doopl came across two screenshots of what look like Android's yet-unannounced L release.

The shots show a Google account login dialog that looks substantially different from the current implementation, and what appears to be a re-styled Chrome with design elements from Quantum. Additionally, the status bar shows a place holder "L" icon, and a bell icon that sources tell us is indicative of a new feature in L that will offer "limited interruptions," basically muting or partially muting notifications.

Occasionally, an OS update will bring around features that really change things. Android 3.0 brought the Android experience to tablets. 4.0 completely revamped the UI and added guidelines that made Android look cohesive for the first time. 4.4 added Svelte, which promised to seat Android comfortably on an even broader range of devices. We have reason to believe another one of those changes is right around the corner, and it's known internally as Hera.